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Do you know the different phases all wood gatherers go through? Yes, we all turn lots of “free wood”. The recent storms have provided us with plenty of opportunities to find and gather fresh turning stock. I’ve been surprised at how much of the available down trees turned out to be oak, paper bark eucalyptus, or pine. But still, there have been opportunities. We refer to this wood as “free wood”, but it can be very expensive. First, you need a good chain saw. Usually, a little trim saw just won’t let you get the wood. You will learn to sharpen a chain, as rocks and dirt are unavoidable, and that occasionally piece of metal can ruin you day. Hauling it home can be another challenge. Sometimes our eyes are bigger than our back. These wet pieces can really weigh a lot.
All this leads to my question.
I’ll say, the first phase is where we take anything we can find.
We don’t have fresh wood as often as we want,
we are just learning and justify turning stuff as practice, chasing cracks, ring shakes, nails, etc.
most of which we eventually throw away.
After a while, you get tired of just practicing, and want to end up with pieces you are proud enough to give away.
Never give garbage pieces, it will come back to haunt you.
In the next phase we get a little pickier about the quality and types of wood we will gather.
But this also leads to more dry spells where you wish you had fresh wood, but don’t.
So when opportunities arise, you gather all you can get.
Then you take it home, stack it up, work to keep it from cracking, and keep moving it around.
Eventually, you start throwing stuff away because it cracked before you could get to it.
This frustration of spending time moving wood around rather than turning drives you to what I call phase 3.
Here we swear off taking more than we can turn.
As soon as we get it home, all other projects stop, and we rough out what we brought home..no,
we didn’t have an idea of what we wanted to make, but we weren’t going to let it crack.
Here we get caught in the vicious cycle. Wet wood becomes available.
We drop everything and process wet wood. The dry stuff can wait.
We swear we will go on a wood diet, but then can’t resist the fresh opportunity.
I’m stuck here.
Supposedly some people progress past this point, taking very small amounts of fresh wood, and not stock piling dry wood.
Unfortunately that’s not me. No matter how often I announce I’m on a wood diet, oh well. Guess I’m addicted.
During some dry spells, I’ve tried to focus on finish turning dry pieces.
But then I get distracted working on things that take a lot of time to do,
or in trying to find a way to salvage the piece of wood that I roughed and waited for it to dry.
Some would refer to it as fire wood. Like the saying, Life is too short to drink cheap wine, Life is too short to waste on garbage wood. Saying it and living by it are two different thing.
Where are you? Can you tell me what the next phase looks like, and should I get there? See you at the meeting.
Dave
www.daves-turned-art.com
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